The beverage industry often utilizes reusable and refillable cylindrical containers to hold, and oftentimes dispense, its contents. Typical of such containers is the conventional beer keg which is traditionally made out of stainless steel. Such containers are usually filled with new contents at the site of the bottling or brewing company, loaded onto trucks and taken to their retail destination where the driver will normally pick up empty containers to be taken back to the beverage company for cleaning and refilling.
As such, it is convenient, if not mandatory, that the cylindrical containers are able to stack onto each other for economical shipment of the greatest number of containers in the smallest amount of space. To that end, the cylindrical containers must be modified to make them stackable. Usually this is accomplished by modifying the diameter of the conventional skirt at the bottom of a container so that it fits over the diameter of the top skirt of a like container below.
Ideally, the container manufacturer prefers to make the skirts for these customers out of high strength stainless steel so that if a container is dropped, or thrown from a truck for example, the skirt will not break or otherwise bend or deform. However, high strength stainless steel is not susceptible to being expanded or elongated to create enough offset for the bottom skirt to fit over the top skirt of a container positioned below. Attempts to so expand the high strength material only results in the cracking or splitting thereof. As a result, most container manufacturers make their skirts out of a softer stainless steel so that they can be appropriately deformed for stacking. Now, however, these skirts are quite susceptible to further deformation upon being dropped and eventually they will become so deformed that they will no longer stack onto like containers.
Another attempt to solve the problem is shown in U.S. Pat. No. 4,573,603. There, the conventional upper and lower stainless steel skirts are eliminated and replaced by a specifically configured collar fastened to the top of the container shell and a specifically configured foot ring fastened to the bottom of the container shell. While these containers may thus be stacked, eliminating the conventional stainless steel skirts detracts from the overall strength of the container. Moreover, such a system requires the manufacture of two items, the upper collar and the lower foot ring, of different configurations, and cannot be used with the multitude of existing and newly conventional stainless steel containers.
The need exists, therefore, for a container having skirts constructed out of high strength stainless steel, for durability, which can readily be configured to stack, with stability, onto a like container.